One Thousand Evangelical Churches in Ethiopia to Receive Funding

One thousand evangelical churches along the western border of Ethiopia will receive church planting funds as a result of the successful completion of a two year project to secure sponsors.

|PIC1|Dr. Charles E. Blair, founder and president of the Blair Foundation, announced on Aug. 31 that funds to plant 1,000 churches in the unreached region of Benishangul-Gumuz, Ethiopia, bordering Sudan, had been secured. The project, called the “Ethiopian Call,” was officially launched on Sept. 1st, 2003 and originated from and was supported by the region’s born-again president, Yaregal Aysheshim.

“He (Aysheshim) said ‘I’d like a thousand churches.’ It wasn’t our idea but his,” said Blair.

“[We decided] if we could get a thousand churches in these villages and require each of the missionaries to reach two other villages, then a total of 3,000 villages making up this region would all have the opportunity to learn about Christianity,” he added.

The “Ethiopian Call” is a project that helped raised a thousand US$1,850 grants for church planting in the Benishangul-Gumuz region of Ethiopia. The amount of US$1,850 will help sponsor the establishment of one church in Ethiopia including a full year salary of US$50/month to the native Ethiopian missionary ministering the church, a study Bible for the missionary and for new converts, four training sessions and materials to construct the church.

“We wanted the common man in America who never had an opportunity to support a church in his life – an orphan yes, but not a building out of mud or tin or whatever material available in that village – to take [for example] 1/3 of a church and give 1/3 of the US$1,850 with two other donors,” said Blair.

“We brought this [project] down to the common people.”

|TOP|The project had initially posed great challenges when Aysheshim explained to Blair that the people of the region were 2,000 years behind the rest of the world and 1,000 years behind the people in other areas of Ethiopia. The people of the region do not wear clothes and they do not go to school but instead hunt and fish to survive.

“I’ve been traveling the world over 50 years for missionary works and that is one of the few really, really unreached people group in the sense of knowing what Christianity is about,” noted Blair. “They call these people in this village – in this area – the forgotten people, not in a spiritual sense as we would use the phrase. But just forgotten in that it is hard to get there, they are next to the Sudan border and they are people that withdraw.”

Yet despite the odds, the project has been successful and was well received by the people of the region. Since April 2005, deployed missionaries have reported 24,863 new converts and 446 of the 1,000 church buildings completed or under construction. The churches are built on land grants by the government according to the constitution of Ethiopia, which grants land for a church building (of any religion) after 25 adults without a place of worship testify their faith.

“It is a piece of security in a troubled world, in a poor world where all the land is owned by the government,” commented Blair.

He said that the “Ethiopian call” had been “one of the greatest experience of my life in the sense that when you do something for people that can’t do anything for you, it brings the greatest satisfaction that mortal man can experience.”

The Blair Foundation is currently in the midst of identifying the needs for a new project of building the only hospital in the region’s state capital which will begin construction within the next six months.







Michelle Vu
Christian Today Correspondent